“…companies like Google and Facebook pay top dollar for some really smart people. Only a few hundred souls on Earth have the talent and the training needed to really push the state-of-the-art [AI] forward, and paying for these top minds is a lot like paying for an NFL quarterback. That’s a bottleneck in the continued progress of artificial intelligence. And it’s not the only one. Even the top researchers can’t build these services without trial and error on an enormous scale. To build a deep neural network that cracks the next big AI problem, researchers must first try countless options that don’t work, running each one across dozens and potentially hundreds of machines.”

This article represents a true picture of where we are today for the average consumer and producer of information, and the companies that repurpose information, e.g. in the form of advertisements.

The advancement and current progress of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, analogously paints a picture akin to the 1970s with computers that fill rooms, and accept punch cards as input.

Today’s consumers have mobile computing power that is on par to the whole rooms of the 1970s; however, “more compute power” in a tinier package may not be the path to AI sentience. How AI algorithm models are computed might need to take an alternate approach.

In a classical computation system, a bit would have to be in one state or the other. However quantum mechanics allows the qubit to be in a superposition of both states at the same time, a property which is fundamental to quantum computing.

The construction, and validation of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, algorithm models should be engineered on a Quantum Computing framework.

FinTech refers to new solutions which demonstrate an incremental or radical / disruptive innovation development of applications, processes, products or business models in the financial services industry. These solutions can be differentiated in at least five areas.

First, the banking or insurance sector are distinguished as potential business sectors. Solutions for the insurance industry are often more specifically named “InsurTech”.

Second, the solutions differ with regard to their supported business processes such as financial information, payments, investments, financing, advisory and cross-process support.[4] An example is mobile payment solutions.

Third, the targeted customer segment distinguishes between retail, private and corporate banking as well as life and non-life insurance. An example are telematics-based insurances that calculate the fees based on customer behaviour in the area of non-life insurances.

Fourth, the interaction form can either be business-to-business (B2B), business-to-consumer (B2C) or consumer-to-consumer (C2C). An example are social trading solutions for C2C.

Fifth, the solutions vary with regard to their market position. Some for example provide complementary services such as personal finance management systems, others focus on competitive solutions such as e.g. peer-to-peer lending.

Global investment in financial technology increased more than twelvefold from $930 million in 2008 to more than $12 billion in 2014

The service, which Verizon only refers to as OTT, or over-the-top, named because it will be available to anyone with an Internet connection, as opposed to a television subscription, is the company’s big growth engine for the future. So far, the company has been mum on the details.

The telecom company is readying a mobile and online video service for launch in late summer, and a top exec says there’s nothing like it.

Verizon continues to line up video content from partners as well as through acquisitions, such as AOL.

Amazon leverages its existing shipping and logistics knowledge and applies it to a new cloud resource, a 3D Printer.

Using Amazon’s platform, a user can connect through Amazon’s cloud services, lock a shared cloud resource, a 3D printer, feed the printer one of several formats: 3D blueprint, 3D digital scan, or industry spec file format. The object is then printed out, and shipped using Amazon’s shipping logistics engine.

Make the object you want and Amazon will ship it to you. How much does it cost? Cost of materials used to produce the object is quantified and charged, in addition to a cloud [resource] usage fee, and potentially discounted shipping based on Amazon’s current scale.

As the service is matured, design tools, basic and advanced, will be provided to produce your designed object. Only your imagination, and capability to express it limits your ability along with Amazon to deliver your products.

At some point, a seller can have a storefront, where objects can not only be shipped, but build on demand as well. For example, circuit boards can be sold now, with the above engine and service, from a seller with the proper schematics.

Advertising Publisher Networks, A.P.N.s, are able to dynamically produce a splash page by ‘My Advertisers’ e.g. for your blog, so in addition to in-line advertising, a sponsors’ page may be dynamically produced, and all your advertisers may have their logo put in the splash page. In addition, the logo may be sized on the page relative to the CPC payout. Each logo icon will have links to the companies or products being advertised.

In other articles I’ve mentioned audio indexing of most frequently used words in podcasts and videos, and now I am saying this sexy growing hashtag applies to music tracks now playing, as an example, someone plays a song in their cloud player, the lyrics are already parse and indexed for the song, so the Amazon cloud player already can provide the lyrics that are most used, and produce a cloud of tags, more used are bigger. Then overlapping that they are able to give the index across all songs now playing, so now we have a dynamic tag cloud with words from lyrics getting bigger, and smaller as they are played in their cloud player.

The user is also able to click a word and drill down to get a list of all the songs currently playing with the lyric word. One caveat, some songs group words together, so it might not make sense out of context. Amazon could apply some rules in the AI engine that specify if certain lyrics are grouped together, then they constitute one tag.

This feature would be another great way to diacover new songs for the music aficionado.

An extension of this is to get the music sound foot print, sound waves from tracks, and overlay with songs now playing, so if you like the beat or rhythm of a song, you can listen to other songs with similar rhythm or beats now playing, another way to find new songs. The matching rhythm can be an automatic shuffle filtered by genre, if specified.

Thinking back to the horror movie by Stephen King, Carrie, I can’t help to draw the many analogies from the car to the smartphone. Men were, and still are obsessive about their cars, fixing them, treating them like real people, with such care, and in some cases, calling their car’s name a woman, implying a romantic connection. If we move forward to the smartphone, we are obsessive about our smartphones, constantly upgrading, babying them, and getting them screen and body protection. We even talk to our smartphones and they answer back with amazing answers. I am not saying that our phones will try to kill us as many pop cult movies imply, what I am saying is try to spend an equal amount of time with all your loved ones, as I blog right now.

I was looking for a unique mouse on the internet, and it doesn’t seem to exist. It’s probably something easy to manufacturer, and will brighten up your day for sure. On the top of the mouse, surrounding the entire body, including the mouse buttons, and except for the base of the mouse is a soft jell layer, soft to the tough, and contains silicone. Within the silicone are diffused LED lights, which are grouped in several colors, such as Blue, Red, Green, and White, or clear. Under the mouse contains the sensor for the mouse movement as well a micro switch, which has 6 settings. 5 of the settings on the switch corresponds to a color, and when selected, light up the jell with that color. The 6th setting is custom, which corresponds to the operating system driver for the USB or Bluetooth mouse. On your computer, there is a light weight application that allows you to select one of several designs or create your own, for example, you could select the pattern which is a rolling wave of lights, or a mixture of colors. The mouse application allows you to select each LED to turn the color on or off, or you could lasso multiple pixels for a quick design. The user may create a static image, or create N static pictures to play in a slideshow, dynamic sequence, like the wave of colors I mentioned. The other optimization I thought of is to integrate the lights to listen to your sound output, and act just like an equalizer, such as iTunes, and have the mouse react to the music, either in a random sequence, or flash up and down to the beat of the music, using the setting for custom.

Someone build it please, sounds cool. If you see something out there like that, please tell me, and happy to post a link to the readers.

This article in the New York Times had me thinking about Soccer and Cameras. I, then progressed onto object identification with cameras, as per my previous post, and then thought about Google Glass. If one were to fit Google Glass on sports sun glasses so it would be protected and affixed as someone played sports, that would be the first step to allow a soccer player to predict the movement of a goalie opponent, and score.

Barriers: motion capture and focus of each frame as the player moved through the field, as the soccer scorer approached the goal. The soccer player taxes a ‘moments’ pause, if at all, and kicks, head butts, whatever, to get the score in the goal. The idea is to be where the soccer player is not. So many variables to deal with by both the goalie, and the opposing team. From the mind of the goal keeper, where are his defense men, where is the opposing force, team advancement and positioning, and so on. However, just as American teams watch old footage of the opposing force, their opposition moves, as well as there defensive weaknesses, so to, can soccer players take advantage, and practice, in real time, with Google Sportswear glasses. These Google Sportswear may take hours and hours of footage, analyze footage, and induce possible defensive moves that a goal keeper might make against a scorer given field positions. There are many variables, however, using object, facial recognition, historical game footage, and these glasses, may make for real-time suggestions to a soccer player for a practice session. I am not suggesting soccer would allow these enhancements during game play, but in practice, they may attune a players skills, just like flight simulators for a pilot.

In addition, with the footage incorporated in the future with the above technology, this technology may improve to be a very useful tool.

Here’s a story to chew on. If there was a national database of both cat and dog facial images, as well as a sound bite of a bark or a purr, using both facial and voice recognition, this bioprint database can help you find and/or replace a lost pet. First, take a biosignature or bioprint of your pet, download the bioprint to a microSD card, and insert the pet’s bioprint into it’s tag. The tag is equipped with an emerging micro technology, a low power Bluetooth emerging technology. Breeders as well as pet owners alike may use this feature for adoption, as well as identifying lost pets.

As a set of national hotspots are gradually equipped with low power Bluetooth emerging technologies, if possible, or smartphones equipped with Bluetooth, they can help identify the missing pet with an app that has access to the lost pet. The owner would update their pet missing, and possibly update the database with a reward. Monetary incentive, with the use of their cell phone, and the app, kids may canvas the neighborhood, and find the pet with their and the matching low power Bluetooth collar. The bioprint confirms the authentication of the missing pet.

Hey, there’s also the possibility of replacing your pet with the best possible match. Creepy.